A History of My Brief Body

Billy-Ray Belcourt

• Publisher: Two Dollar Radio
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781937512941
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

Lambda Literary Award, Finalist / "A Best Book of 2020" — Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, CBC, Globe and Mail, Largehearted Boy.

"Stunning... Happiness, this beautiful book says, is the ultimate act of resistance." —Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine
The youngest ever winner of the Griffin Prize mines his personal history in a brilliant new essay collection seeking to reconcile the world he was born into with the world that could be.

For readers of Ocean Vuong and Maggie Nelson and fans of Heart Berries by Terese Marie Mailhot, A History of My Brief Body is a brave, raw, and fiercely intelligent collection of essays and vignettes on grief, colonial violence, joy, love, and queerness.

Billy-Ray Belcourt's debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray's writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve. What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place. Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us.

NOTES

Preface: A Letter to Nôhkom

¹Warsan Shire, Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth (London: flipped eye, 2011).

²José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity (New York: New York University Press, 2009), 73.

Introduction: A Short Theoretical Note

¹According to cultural theorist Ann Cvetkovich, political depression emerges from the realization “that customary forms of political response, including direct action and critical analysis, are no longer working either to change the world or to make us feel better.” See her Depression: A Public Feeling (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012).

²Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), 109. Sharpe is, of course, writing about the “breathtaking spaces” that emerge within the weather of anti-blackness.

An NDN Boyhood

¹Sheila Heti,Motherhood (Toronto: Knopf, 2018), 124.

²The afterlife of history emerges of course from Saidiya Hartman’s crucial “the afterlife of slavery.”

³The “outrun” metaphor inspired by Terese Marie Mailhot’s Heart Berries: A Memoir (Toronto: Doubleday Canada, 2018), 3: “We sometimes outrun ourselves.”

⁴This is a line from my first book, This Wound Is a World (Calgary: Frontenac House, 2017).

⁵Ibid.

⁶Cited in Dylan Robinson, “Intergenerational Sense, Intergenerational Responsibility,” in Arts of Engagement: Taking Aesthetic Action In and Beyond the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada, ed. Dylan Robinson and Keavy Martin (Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2016), 43.

⁷DukeWomenStudies, “2013 Feminist Theory Workshop Keynote Speaker José Esteban Muñoz,” YouTube, May 8, 2013, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=huGN866GnZE.

A History of My Brief Body

¹“We Speak About Violence: Abdellah Taïa and Édouard Louis in Conversation,” Paris Review, July 2, 2018, https://www.theparis-review.org/blog/2018/07/02/we-speak-about-violence-abdellah-taia-and-edouard-louis-in-conversation/.

²Recycled from “Duplex (The Future’s a Fist)” in my poetry collection NDN Coping Mechanisms: Notes from the Field (Toronto: House of Anansi Press, 2019).

³Lee Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004), 5.

⁴Indebted to language in Mailhot, Heart Berries, 34: “It seems innate that I am fucked up.”

Futuromania

¹Lisa Robertson, Cinema of the Present (Toronto: Coach House Books, 2014), 5.

²Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004), 18.

³Dionne Brand, Ossuaries (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010), 84.

⁴Maggie Nelson, Something Bright, Then Holes (New York: Soft Skull, 2018), 24.

⁵Muñoz, Cruising Utopia, 49.

⁶See Hieu Minh Nguyen’s “It’s important that I mention, I truly wanted to be beautiful / for her.” From “Changeling,” in his Not Here (Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2018), 55.

Gay: 8 Scenes

¹Archive on Demand, “Poetry Reading: Ocean Vuong,”YouTube, March 29, 2017, https://www.youtube.com/watch...